Five Common Questions About Dwolla’s ACH API

By: Genny Couch

November 18, 2016

Share this blog post

Members of Dwolla’s business development team spend their days communicating with businesses that are interested in a white-label ACH API for their platform, application or marketplace to power payments.

They get to chat with a variety of businesses—some are realizing a new need for integrating ACH payments into their platform, some are seasoned, aiming to switch from an existing service, and others are just learning the ins and outs of ACH.

If you fall into that last category and are just starting the search, welcome to the exciting world of ACH payments! When I first started learning about ACH, I remember being overwhelmed with the amount of information there was to learn. Early on, I found that this ACH blog post really helped me.

Before getting started with an ACH API, I hear a lot of common ACH API questions from different business types.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what other businesses and platforms are asking when integrating with an ACH provider—and get immediate access to the most common ACH API questions in one fell swoop? That’s exactly what this blog post is intended to do.

I’ve taken my experience working with a variety of businesses to produce some helpful, practical answers to the common questions that come up.

Let’s go.

1. What’s Dwolla all about?

Dwolla is unique in that our ACH payment API is considered a white-label ACH API, meaning you can build ACH capabilities right into your web or mobile application, with your branding at the forefront for the end-user.

Dwolla’s robust set of APIs offer a customizable UX for the three endpoints necessary to facilitate a transfer—the creation of the customer, the connecting of the funding source, and the initiation of the transfer.

You build it, pass on the necessary information to us through the API and we’ll help you handle the rest.

2. That sounds great. What do you charge for your services?

This is another reason Dwolla is unique—while most of our competitors charge a fee on every transaction, we don’t believe that model works for all businesses.

Dwolla’s SaaS (software as a service) model offers customizable options that best fit your business model—while also providing enough flexibility to grow as you grow.

We believe that our product is more than just the transaction. We offer a full-stack solution for bank-to-bank transfers in the United States. Programs that charge per-transaction fees can get expensive very quickly, and that’s just no fun.

When you talk to a member of our Business Development Team, we spend time getting familiar with your business, so we can put a fair and competitive price in front of you.

3. Do you also process credit card transactions?

We do not. We solely enable transaction processing from one U.S. bank account to another U.S. bank account via the ACH Network.

Be comforted by the fact that Dwolla only works with ACH. We’ve spent the better part of a decade learning the ins and outs of the network and perfecting our ACH API.

However, we fully support our customers using other providers alongside Dwolla to accept credit cards as an additional form of payment on their application. And our ACH payment API is technology agnostic, meaning it can play nice with other technologies or integrations.

We have a testing environment that is a replica of our production environment. Play in the Dwolla Sandbox and test how our API works with your application.

4. My tech team would love to see your documentation. Can I test out your API?

I’m so glad you asked. While my expertise is on the business side, Dwolla has an awesome tech and product team. They have put our ACH API documentation into one place, which is great for clients that are wanting to go live in production ASAP.

You can work with me on getting the paperwork done, and your tech team can be heads-down working on integration.

5. Alright, this all sounds like what I’ve been looking for. How do I get in touch?

After you’ve reached out, one of our integration specialists will set up that initial call to learn more about your application. After that, you can tell all your friends how great Dwolla is. [insert winky face]

I’m sure you have some more questions that have been left unanswered, but these are some of the most common that I hear when businesses jump on their first call with me. If this sounds like the solution you’ve been looking for, I hope I’ll be hearing from you soon!

Dwolla, Inc. is an agent of Veridian Credit Union and all funds associated with your account in our network are held in one or more pooled accounts at Veridian Credit Union. These funds may not be eligible for share insurance by the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund. Dwolla, Inc. is the operator of a software platform that communicates user instructions for funds transfers to Veridian Credit Union.